Marital Happiness Habits: Proven Strategies To Build The Most Successful And Satisfying Marriage

If you’ve been in a marriage or committed relationship for some length of time, you may be experiencing something that you are reluctant to share even with your closest family and friends—boredom. Although this may seem like a paltry or self-indulgent problem, it can begin with petty misgivings and complaints and ultimately snowball into dissatisfactions and breakup daydreams that plague you and poison your relationship. Your first instinct may be to end the marriage, but you don’t know whether you should or how to go about it. Instead, you may be hurting, consumed with guilt, ruminating about your feelings, making excuses, and oscillating between paralysis and panic.

Before you take a single step, it’s critical to consider that the arrival fallacy is likely driving those first instincts. This is the assumption that “I’ll be happy when . . . I’m married to the right person.” You may have devoted a great deal of time, energy, and consideration to finding a fitting or ideal partner, and you applied yourself to caring for your marriage. Yet despite your efforts and good fortune, you are now beginning to realize that your marriage is not giving you the satisfaction that you thought it would or that it once had. This is a determining moment, as it calls for you to understand whether your expectations are realistic and whether you are asking too much of your marriage. As I describe below, even the happiest marriages cannot maintain their initial satisfaction level, and only with a great deal of energy and commitment can you approach that initial level.

This article is about the choices and insights available if you find yourself in a marriage or long-term relationship that has ceased to satisfy. You can continue to be tormented by your thoughts and hope that they will fade with time, or you can strive to understand their source and act to resolve or attenuate them. The approaches I describe teach you and your partner how to reinvest in your relationship. After all, the promise of new, fulfilling, positive directions is at stake.

I’M BORED WITH MY MARRIAGE, OR, GETTING USED TO YOUR SPOUSE

Hedonic adaptation is an important theme of this article, and other subsequent articles—namely, the fact that human beings have the remarkable capacity to grow habituated or inured to most life changes. A hot topic in the fields of psychology and economics, hedonic adaptation explains why both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat abate with time. What is particularly fascinating about this phenomenon, however, is that it is most pronounced with respect to positive experiences. Indeed, it turns out that we are prone to take for granted pretty much everything positive that happens to us. When we move into a beautiful new mezzanine with a grand view, when we finally graduate from college, when we purchase a fancy new car or the latest iPhone, when we get that promotion and a salary raise at work, when we become immersed in a new hobby, and even when we wed, we obtain an immediate boost of happiness from the improved situation; but the thrill only lasts for a short time. Over the coming days, weeks, and months, we find our expectations ramping upward and we begin taking our new improved circumstances for granted. We are left with “felicific stagnation.” I will discuss the implications of hedonic adaptation to our jobs and to our incomes in my next articles, but I focus on adaptation to marriage here.

In my view, marrying my wife was the best thing that ever happened to me—an event that brought me immense joy, which reverberates to this day, and which has given rise to multiple and wonderful downstream repercussions in my life. The most famous study exploring this issue, however, found that although the average person picks up a sizable boost in happiness when he or she gets married, this boost only lasts about two years, after which the former newlywed reverts back to his or her happiness level before the engagement.

When you were newly in love, you probably had the capacity to be happy while being stuck in traffic or getting your teeth cleaned. But this phase didn’t last very long. So, if you find yourself less euphoric and less amorous than at the beginning of your relationship, you are experiencing what most other humans have experienced before you, and any friends of yours who claim otherwise (with rare exceptions) are probably lying to you or to themselves.

Marital bliss, like new job bliss or new car bliss, is highly prone to hedonic adaptation, but infatuation, passion, and electric attraction carry the added liability of having an even shorter half-life. When we first fall in love, if we are lucky, we experience what researchers call passionate love, but over the years, this type of love usually turns into companionate love. Passionate love is a state of intense longing, desire, and attraction, whereas companionate love is composed more of deep affection, connection, and liking. If you are wondering what kind of love you are experiencing now—or had in the past—judge the extent to which you agree with statements like the ones below. 

For passionate love:

• I find it hard to work because I’m always thinking about my partner.
• I am so involved with my partner that I could not even be slightly interested in someone else.
• I am terribly afraid that my partner might reject me.

For companionate love:

• My partner is one of the most likable people I know.
• My partner is the sort of person that I would like to be.
• I have great confidence in my partner’s good judgment.

There are evolutionary, physiological, and practical reasons for why passionate love cannot endure for very long. I hazard to say that if we continued to obsess about our partners and to have sex multiple times a day—every day—we would not be very productive at work or attentive to our children, our friends, or our health. To quote a line from the 2004 film Before Sunset, about two former lovers who chance to meet again after a decade, if passion did not fade, “we would end up doing nothing at all with our lives.” Indeed, being madly in love shares some key characteristics with addiction and narcissism, and if unabated, would eventually take its toll. In any event, the heightened passion and chemical attraction evident at the beginning of a love affair have been found to fade to neutral in a couple of years, after the love affair turns into a solid, committed relationship or marriage. Furthermore, this shift in feelings is often accompanied by a decline in overall satisfaction, as the fun and leisure typical of the honeymoon phase turn to domestic drudgery, and as partners stop being on their best behavior and relax their efforts to be constantly responsive and considerate toward each other.

Fortunately, as evolutionary psychologists might tell it, both passionate and companionate love are essential for human beings to survive and reproduce. While passionate love is necessary to galvanize us to pair up and direct all our energies into building a new relationship, companionate love appears to be critical for nourishing a committed, stable partnership long enough to reproduce our genes (i.e., have children) and ensure they survive and flourish. It should be said that both types of love bring their own unique brand of happiness—one more exciting, perhaps, and the other more meaningful.

In light of the naturally occurring decay of the passion and joy experienced early in marriage, we seem to be perverse in our expectations that our long-term relationships should continue to serve as vehicles for our desires and wish fulfillments. Indeed, I would argue even more strongly that our romance with the idea of romance has led us to misunderstand the function, complexity, and typical life course of marriage, leaving us disappointed when our marriages don’t constantly fulfill our longings for passion, satisfaction, intimacy, and permanence. As we reflect on our experiences of boredom or waning passion or petty dissatisfaction in our current partnerships, we should reexamine these assumptions and establish the extent to which our experiences may simply be manifestations of an extraordinarily ordinary process.

Research suggests several secrets to overcoming, forestalling, or at least slowing down hedonic adaptation to committed relationships. The first recommendation is one you have already begun to follow simply by reading this, and that is to learn about the ordinariness of this phenomenon and to acknowledge the creeping normalcy in your own relationship. By recognizing the arrival fallacy that is underlying your dismay and discontent, you can begin to understand and exculpate your experiences and take steps to elevate them. Next comes the difficult part, as slowing down the process by which you take your partner (and other things in your life) more and more for granted demands dedicated effort—effort that may be required every week of your married life. Indeed, if we are to successfully resolve our marital problems, the process of resisting adaptation should ideally begin long before those problems ever come.

WHY YOU ADAPT TO THE GOOD STUFF

Nearly all of us eventually become accustomed to our marriages and to our partners, and the science of adaptation explains why. Although some of its implications are unwelcome, they also reveal ways we can grapple with this near-universal problem. Just as understanding a disease yields insight into how to treat it, the benefits of understanding a psychological phenomenon is that we gain insight into how we can manipulate it.

Below, I describe a number of practical strategies which will be valuable when we say to ourselves, “After finding the right person, I thought I’d be happy for a long time, but now I find myself dissatisfied and bored.”

• The Importance Of Appreciating

One of the clues that lets you know you’ve adapted to your partner is that you’ve ceased to appreciate her. Truly appreciating someone means valuing her, being grateful for her, savoring your time with her, and remaining keenly aware of the goodness she has brought into your life. When you first got married, for example, the shift in your circumstances was captivating and novel. You delighted in using the words husband and wife, and you couldn’t help but be conscious and grateful for all the fringe benefits that marriage brings. You may have savored your spouse and thought about her frequently, if not constantly. In due time, however, being married—being called husband or wife, sitting at the kitchen table with your spouse, greeting her passionately at the end of the day—stopped being novel or surprising. After all, your daily life is undoubtedly replete with uplifts and hassles wholly unrelated to your being married—frustration at work, car problems, a successful exercise program, a surprise visit from a high-school friend. Such everyday events elicit their own emotional reactions, making you feel stressed, amused, jubilant, or relieved, and they may eventually overshadow the fact of your new marital status, compelling it to fade into the background of your life. However, the lesson is that if we continue to be grateful, appreciative, and aware of our new spouse—if she frequently pops into our minds and inspires strong emotional reactions in us—we will be able to resist taking her for granted. People who persist at appreciating a good turn in their lives are less likely to adapt to it.

Appreciation is vitally important for several reasons. First, appreciating our relationship compels us to extract the maximum possible satisfaction from it and helps us to be grateful for it, relish it, savor it, and not take it for granted. Second, we come to feel more positively about ourselves and to feel more connected to others. Third, our expression of appreciation motivates both us and our partners to bolster efforts to take care of the relationship. And, finally, appreciation helps prevent us from getting too “spoiled” and from paying too much attention to social comparisons and experiencing envy. In other words, pausing to appreciate the positives in our relationships and to reevaluate them as gifts or “blessings” prompts us to focus on what we have today, rather than heeding what our friends and neighbors have or what we wish we had.

Studies show that people who regularly practice appreciation or gratitude—who, for example, “count their blessings” once a week over the course of one to twelve consecutive weeks or pen appreciation letters to people who’ve been kind and meaningful—become reliably happier and healthier, and remain happier for as long as six months after the experiment is over. This is persuasive evidence that appreciating a positive circumstance (like marriage) may help us defy adaptation to it. Simple exercises involving writing down what you appreciate about your partner or your marriage, or writing a gratitude letter to your partner (and not even necessarily sharing it) have been shown to be highly effective.

Another way to truly appreciate and relish our relationship is to imagine subtracting it from our lives. What if we had never been introduced to our wife? In that case, a multitude of good things about our lives today may not have come to pass. When not taken to an extreme (which could leave us feeling undeserving about our lives or anxious about losing everything), this “subtraction” strategy can be even more effective than direct attempts at gratitude.

In sum, appreciation exercises will help us bask in the overlooked positives within our relationship by savoring the here and now and by maintaining a positive and optimistic perspective. When we relish our partner’s strengths, mentally transport ourselves to days when we felt closest, or truly appreciate the present moment, we are not taking our relationship for granted.

• The Importance Of Variety

Ensuring that our marriages are spiced with plentiful variety is critical if we want to stave off adaptation. Indeed, by definition, adaptation happens when we face something constant or repeated—when every weekend date night involves dinner and a movie, or when the intimacy or commitment we feel with our partner has reached an unchanging equilibrium. There is something about variety—variety in our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors—that is innately stimulating and rewarding. Indeed, being exposed to variety and novelty appears to have similar affects on our brains—specifically, on activity involving the neurotransmitter dopamine—as do pharmacological “highs,” positive emotions, and reward-seeking behavior. Hence, we can maximize and help sustain (at least in part) the happiness of our marriages and the excitement of our time together by mixing things up—by varying what we do with our partners, by changing our minds, and by being spontaneous. This might seem trite advice, but variety can truly permit our relationships and our loves to remain fresh, meaningful, and positive.

• The Importance Of Surprise

Another pivotal factor in the pursuit of sustained marital bliss (and the prevention of hedonic adaptation) is the element of surprise. Although variety and surprise seem like very similar concepts—and, to be sure, they often go together—they are in fact distinct. For example, a series of events (like the movies you might see in a single period of time) can be varied but not surprising, and, although a single event (like an unexpected confession) can be surprising, by definition, a single event cannot be variable.

The beginnings of relationships hold a million surprises for us: How will she react when I tell her about my interest in politics? Does she like to be touched in this way or that way? I wonder if she wants to have kids as badly as I do? Is he funny at dinner parties? What are his friends and family really like? In short, new relationships, like new jobs, hobbies, and travels, have the property of yielding many surprising experiences, challenges, fascinations, and novel opportunities. Furthermore, new relationships possess what researchers call “the lure of ambiguity”: When we don’t know our partners very well, we read into them what we wish to see. However, with time, our partners become altogether known, we fall into a routine, and the number of surprises decreases, even dwindling to zero. During our first year together, our partners may reveal a side of themselves that we never knew. During the tenth year, such an experience is a great deal less likely. At some point, we may feel that we have learned everything there is to learn about our spouse and there are no more surprises left.

What’s so special about surprise? When we perceive something novel in our environments (“I never noticed how considerate he is to strangers”), we stand to attention and hence are more likely to appreciate it, to contemplate it, and remember it. We are less likely to take our marriage for granted when it continues to deliver strong emotional reactions in us. (It’s worth noting that this argument applies to negative reactions as well, but, of course, I am talking about positive emotions here.) Furthermore, uncertainty in and of itself can enhance the pleasure of positive events. For example, a series of studies showed that people experience longer bursts of happiness when they receive an unexpected act of kindness and remain uncertain about who did it and why. Such reactions are even mirrored in our brains. In one experiment, when thirsty participants were informed that they would finally be able to drink, those who didn’t know what they were going to get (i.e., water versus a more attractive beverage) showed more activity in the parts of their brains linked to positive emotions. So, our goal should be to create more unexpected moments and unpredictable pleasures in our relationship—surprises that fire and delight. This may be easier said than done, but several strategies have been found to be successful.

• A Pinch Of Novelty And A Soupçon Of Surprise

The advice that we should be more spontaneous strikes many as a little bit perverse. The same may be said about recommendations to intentionally create surprise and variety in our lives. I agree, in principle, yet following such recommendations is more feasible than we might think. Of course, sitting around and willing surprise, mystery, and randomness to come into our lives won’t work. What’s more effective is to partake of activities known to yield varied and surprising experiences. Traveling to novel places with our partners—by definition, an activity in which we are no longer slaves to daily routines, have more time to relax and reflect, and are prone to chance experiences—is a no-brainer. So is opening up our socializing to a wider set of acquaintances and friends, or being receptive to new opportunities and adventures. When you and your live-in boyfriend are invited to an intriguing fund-raiser by someone you met at the gym, you go. When the two of you learn about a funky restaurant in a dodgy part of town, you try it. When your spouse develops a new interest in art or cycling or massively multiplayer online games, you join her on an odyssey to learn more.

Some researchers propose that injecting novelty requires a direct approach—namely, mustering effort to literally notice new things about your partner. For example, every day next week, charge yourself with detecting one way in which your partner is different that day. This extremely simple exercise may render him or her more compelling and appealing. Although every time you read the Sunday newspaper together and every time you kiss and every time you make pasta e fagioli seems indistinguishable from the previous time, try to observe ways in which each occasion is actually different. Supporting this idea, one study asked people to select an activity that they disliked (such as cleaning the house or commuting) and then instructed them to pay heed to three novel or unfamiliar qualities of the activity while they were engaging in it. Those asked to hunt for novelty ended up liking the activity more and we’re more likely to repeat it on their own.

Another technique to prevent ourselves from getting used to something or someone involves shaking up our routines. An intriguing line of research has found that interrupting positive experiences renders them more enjoyable. The argument seems counterintuitive at first. When your spouse is giving you a rather good massage or you are listening together to your favorite music or watching a hilarious movie or relishing a walk in the park, the last thing you want is to suspend what you are doing. However, it turns out that people enjoy massages more when they are interrupted with a twenty-minute break, enjoy television programs more when they are interrupted with commercials, and enjoy songs they like more when they are interrupted with a twenty-second gap.

The key to understanding these findings is to recognize that we can adapt to a short-term positive experience like watching a movie or getting a massage in much the same way we adapt to a major life change like getting married or moving to a new city. The moderately pleasant experience of watching a comedy yields us slightly less delight and satisfaction as it runs—not because we enjoy it less, but because we gradually get used to the pleasant feeling (or amusement or cleverness or suspense), so much so that it becomes our new norm or standard. At that point, an even more pleasant jolt would be needed to evoke a stronger emotional response from us. What interruptions are able to accomplish is essentially to disrupt this process of relaxing into our experience and “reset” it to a higher intensity of enjoyment. For example, a break during a massage or a gripping conversation may magnify our anticipation for their resumption and provide us with an opportunity to savor what is still to follow. William James, who advised people to enliven dull activities with “ruptures of routine,” would have wholeheartedly agreed.

A leading authority on love, SUNY–Stony Brook professor Art Aron argues that in order to fend off boredom in a marriage, couples should mutually engage in what he calls “expanding” activities—that is, novel activities that are stimulating, yield new experiences, and teach new skills—and challenge each other to grow. In a classic experiment, upper-middle-class middle-aged couples were presented with a list of activities that both members had reported doing infrequently and had agreed were either “pleasant” (such as creative cooking, visiting friends, or seeing a movie) or “exciting” (skiing, dancing, or attending concerts). Then, over the course of the next ten weeks, they were instructed to select one of these activities each week and to spend ninety minutes doing it together. Those couples that engaged in the “exciting” activities reported being more satisfied with their marriages at the end of the ten weeks than those that simply did “pleasant” or enjoyable things together.

Aron obtained similar results when he instructed couples to visit his laboratory and complete a very brief (seven-minute) task that was either neutral, or novel and physiologically arousing. It’s hard to come up with an exciting activity that you and your spouse could pull off in seven minutes in a strange room, but these researchers devised a sort of wacky exercise that might ring familiar to anyone who’s ever been on company team-building retreats. The activity involved traversing obstacles on a nine-meter gymnasium mat while attached to your partner with Velcro straps at one wrist and one ankle, crawling on your hands and knees the whole time, and carrying a cylindrical pillow that had to be held between your bodies or heads. The neutral activity also involved crawling across a gymnasium mat, but the primary goal entailed rolling a ball to each other. Whether the couples were only dating or long-married, the ones who did the shared novel activity were more likely than the ones who did the shared neutral activity to agree to statements like “I feel happy when I am doing something to make my partner happy” and “I feel ‘tingling’ and ‘an increased heartbeat’ when I think of my partner” after the activity than before. Even more impressive was the fact that observers who viewed the couples having a conversation about their future plans judged those who had partaken of the exciting activity to show increased positive behaviors towards each other(e.g., greater acceptance and less hostility) after the activity than those who had partaken of the mundane task.

It’s not difficult to imagine that for many couples, completing the crazy crawling assignment might provoke hysterical laughter. As corny as I sometimes find such exercises, I can’t ignore the fact that they lead people to feel closer, warmer, and even more attracted toward each other. Surprisingly, the effects of even such brief activities can last for as long as seven hours. However, there’s no need for anybody to go out and purchase Velcro straps and cylindrical pillows; the effects on relationship quality are comparable when we simply sit down with our spouses to create a list of things that we would both like to do that we find exciting. Researchers surmise that shared participation in exciting and novel activities triggers positive feelings (e.g., we might misinterpret the apprehension we feel while rock climbing as bolstered attraction), boosts couples’ sense of interdependence and closeness (due to the collaborative aspect of many such activities, like the gymnasium mat crawling), leads us to learn new things about each other (as in a study that instructed couples to pick up cards with intimate questions on them and take turns answering them), and generates positive emotions in general (e.g., amusement, pride, curiosity, joy), which tends to color everything in our lives, including our marriages, in more positive, optimistic strokes.

Thank you so much for taking your time to read this article. In our next article we shall discuss on how to do when you lose the passion, or, getting used to sex with your spouse. I will also show you the strategies you need to start applying in your marriage, so as to nurture the relationship with your partner. Please stay tuned as we grow together.